the glavk, ministry, or Gosplan levels according to the authorities’ best estimates of necessary minima. Some bargaining would occur at this stage, too. Finally, early in the fall, Gosplan would endeavor to form a feasible national plan close to the original control figures. The eventual directive plan could have as many as sixty thousand separate headings. Usually, the sheer complexity of the task, unavoidable delays, and insufficient information meant that the legally binding enterprise plan (techpromfinplan) was neither consistent nor optimal from the planners’ point of view, not to mention the needs of the population at large. See also: FIVE-YEAR PLANS; GOSPLAN; TECHPROMFINPLAN
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bergson, Abram. (1964). The Economics of Soviet Planning. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gregory, Paul R., and Stuart, Robert C. (1998). Russian and Soviet Economic Performance and Structure, 6th ed. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
The Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty was signed in Paris on November 19, 1990, after less than two years of negotiation, by the members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO). Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev’s announcement to the United Nations in December 1988 of unilateral Soviet force reductions had presented a challenge to NATO. Negotiations on conventional forces thus began in Vienna in March, 1989.
The Soviet leadership sought to reduce the threat of new western weapons and operational concepts, to create a “breathing space” for internal economic and social restructuring, and to divert manpower and resources to the country’s economy. Both superpowers wanted to eliminate capabilities for initiating surprise attacks and large- scale offensive actions. The treaty mandated the reduction to equal levels of NATO and WTO forces from the Atlantic to the Ural Mountains across five categories of weapons: armored combat vehicles (ACVs), artillery, combat aircraft, combat helicopters and tanks. The WTO nations were expected to make the largest cuts, given their numerical superiority. The treaty also provided for an advanced verification regime, including intrusive on-site verification and data exchanges.
The collapse of the USSR and Warsaw Pact in the period 1990-1991 presented problems, however. East European members of the WTO were unilaterally demanding the withdrawal of Soviet forces from their soil. Western critics argued that by focusing on bloc-to-bloc negotiations at a time like this, NATO was constraining itself unnecessarily. The USSR seemed hesitant to complete the CFE agreement, since the WTO hardly constituted a credible bloc. Meanwhile, the Soviet successor states were loath to see their future military forces constrained by a treaty signed by the former regime. Nevertheless, by January 1992, all agreed to ratify the CFE treaty, and three years later, the parCOOPERATIVE SOCIETIES ties had eliminated some fifty thousand weapons and withdrawn fifteen thousand more.
The CFE treaty was later modified in November 1999, upon Russia’s request. As late as 2003, NATO was continuing to press Moscow to reduce the number of tanks, armored combat vehicles (ACVs), and artillery it deployed in its northern and southern “flank” regions, namely Moldova and Georgia, which border Europe and the Black Sea. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) was monitoring Russia’s compliance with the CFE treaty. See also: NORTH ATLANTIC TREATY ORGANIZATION; WARSAW TREATY ORGANIZATION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Graham, Thomas. (2002). Disarmament Sketches: Three Decades of Arms Control and International Law. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Jenner, Peter. (2000). Defense and Security for the 21st Century. London: NATO Parliamentary Assembly. Peters, John E. (1999). The Changing Quality of Stability in Europe: The Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty Toward 2001. Santa Monica, CA: RAND. Sharp, Jane M. O. (2003). History, Analysis, and Evaluation of the CFE Negotiation Oxford: Oxford University Press.
and were thus placed on an equal footing with state enterprises. No longer was the size of a cooperative or the amount of its assets limited. Cooperatives could now engage in any economic activity, except for those prohibited by law. Financial arrangements also moved in a new direction. Shares in a business could be issued. There was no limit on income, the size of which could be based either on one’s financial contribution to the cooperative or on the amount of work one performed there. Cooperatives still had to be registered by local authorities, but these administrative organs no longer had the right of approval or disapproval of its activities. Cooperatives were made formally independent of the state sector, and the latter was forbidden to give compulsory state orders to cooperatives. Cooperatives were given the right to form joint ventures with foreign companies. In essence, the Law made cooperatives indistinguishable from capitalist enterprises. See also: CAPITALISM; ECONOMY, POST-SOVIET; LIBERALISM; PERESTROIKA
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hansen, Philip. (1988). “The Draft Law on Cooperatives: An Assessment.” Radio Liberty 111/88, March 15. Jones, Anthony, and Moskoff, William. (1991). Ko-ops: The Rebirth of Entrepreneurship in the Soviet Union. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
The Law on Cooperatives (hereafter the Law) was adopted in May 1988 to offer greater clarity about the direction of private economic activity during the early period of perestroika. This was necessitated by the fact that the earlier Law on Individual Labor Activity, which went into effect in May 1987 as the first step toward creating a legal private sector, was ambiguous as well as limited in its provisions for privatization. Private economic activity, embodied in organizations called “cooperatives,” quickly evolved beyond the provisions of the 1987 Law, and the new Law was intended to reflect the reality of the growing cooperative movement.
In general, the Law liberalized the way in which cooperatives operated. The legal basis for private enterprise was changed, and cooperatives were accorded the status of “basic units” in the economy
COOPERATIVE SOCIETIES
Cooperative societies, as distinguished from the peasant commune and arteli (cooperative associations) of peasant migrant laborers, were seen by the liberal and socialist intelligentsia of the mid-nineteenth century as devices to protect the laboring classes from exploitation and empower them (cf. Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?). The famine of 1891-1892 and the subsequent intensification of industrial development led the educated classes and some government agencies to foster the growth of cooperatives, although bureaucratic restrictions persisted. The movement burgeoned between the Revolution of 1905 and World War I, with a tenfold increase in the number of cooperative societies, which handled roughly 7 percent
of consumer goods sales by 1914. The main types were urban consumer cooperatives, concerned principally with retail and wholesale trade, and agricultural credit cooperatives, whose primary purpose was to make short- term loans to members. There were also some producer associations, most notably butter cooperatives of Northern Russia and Western Siberia, and artisanal cooperatives. During World War I, cooperatives increased by another 60 percent, helping to produce goods for the war effort and cushion consumers against inflation.
After 1917, Bolshevik policy alternated between tolerating cooperatives as voluntary organizations and making them into quasi-state organs. During war communism, cooperatives became adjuncts of the Commissariat of Supply, to which producers and consumers were required to belong. Agricultural producer cooperatives were few and weak, but valued by the Soviet regime as precursors of collective farming. During the New Economic Policy (NEP), the Communist Party allowed cooperatives to resume their function as voluntary organizations, and Lenin singled them out as the means to lead peasants to socialism. By 1926 and 1927, with the state supporting them as an alternative to private entrepreneurs, cooperatives accounted for as much as half of consumer trade, and a fifth of handicraft and small-scale industrial production. All this ended in 1929 and 1930, when voluntary cooperatives were eliminated during industrialization and collectivization. Although cooperatives nominally persisted, with the kolkhoz defined as an artel in the 1934 Model Charter, in fact they had lost their independent status and once again became
